Hey everyone me kevin here, my goodness, facebook has had a wild ride in this video we're going to talk a little bit about what may have gone wrong, and could it happen again so first, it's worth noting that this morning, around 11 40 eastern time, according to The new york times facebook, instagram oculus, messenger, whatsapp, employee services, like emails and cell phone services related to facebook, all started having issues or just completely going down around 11 40 a.m. Eastern time again per the new york times now. Some folks are now going nuts on twitter tweeting things all over. That facebook being down is a great way to end political divisiveness, end world hunger and create world of peace.

The library of los angeles is tweeting that real books are still working and others are suggesting. They had no idea how much they used instagram or facebook until it went down. So this isn't even to mention the fact that now there are millions of people who use sign in with facebook to check out on purchases or to to just log into certain websites or accounts that they can't access when facebook goes down. So the issues of this approximately five hour plus outage have been a disaster for individuals with businesses losing millions of dollars worth of revenue and a lot of very upset and confused people wondering what's happening is facebook.

Doing something did facebook get hacked is? Did facebook screw up what is happening here and we finally have a little bit of insight into what may have created this largest internet outage for facebook, since the 2019 outage, which affected some sites for about 24 hours, keep in mind a lot of facebook websites still At the time of this recording are still having issues, though they are slowly coming back online. So here's what we got right now it looks like it is unlikely some form of a cyber attack or a hack. That's because usually cyber attacks or hacks don't damage and shut down. So many different things at once.

It's probably more of a server communication issue and we're going to talk about what it potentially could be, at least what experts believe it could be right now, and it has to do with this weird thing called the border gateway protocol, and this is sometimes referred to As the postal service of the internet, except nobody's actually running that postal service, it works almost like a crypto network where different nodes about 64 000 of them called autonomous systems throughout the world, communicate dns data. So that way, the internet can function in kind of a decentralized way. It's kind of like decentralized finance before there was decentralized, uh finance, it's decentralized internet. So an easy way to think about.

This is just by the mail analogy. So, let's say you're gon na mail, something okay, let's say this piece of paper towel here is an envelope and we're going to mail. This we're going to ship this. The postal service determines the quickest route for sending this letter or package to reach its destination.

So let's say it's gon na go from here to uh florida uh, then to the bahamas and then to germany right because i'm trying to send this to germany. Well, would it be faster for it to go from california to new york and then to germany? I don't know, but this sort of decentralized space makes that determination, and so, when somebody submits data on the internet, you're kind of sending a parcel, it's kind of like sending data. One way you send data and you receive data right, send receive that's how the internet functions, so you and for example, if you like go to google and you submit a query on google, you are sending a request and then you receive a return for data. So it's a two-way system, so a nice slow, easy way to think about it, just mail.

I send a letter to germany. Eventually i get a letter back hopefully from germany. Well, when someone submits data on the internet, the p g p again, the border gateway protocol determines the quickest route for this data to go, and it usually results in data traveling across multiple nodes which again very eerily similar to cryptocurrency and how it works. Travels across multiple nodes to get there kind of like i mentioned steps in florida, then bahamas right stops at multiple nodes, known as autonomous systems, and this is kind of like going to different branches to get to its destination in the mail example.

Well, autonomous systems are what the internet is made up of, we'll just call them ases. For now, asses are really just a large pool of routers that are run by individual organizations all across the world and there's no centralized organization that runs all of the nodes. These could be companies, they could be internet service providers, they could be governments, they could be inter universities. There are about 64 000 of these nodes throughout the world, and it's kind of like how there are probably hundreds of thousands of post offices throughout the world.

You got to go through these different nodes and checkpoints and distribution centers to get your mail where it needs to go, and the internet, though, is very, very complicated. It changes a lot new systems and new rules come and go, and so these nodes have to keep up with changes and the way these nodes keep up with changes is uh, unlike post offices, the uh these as are not unified by one company, there's no, like Usps sometimes they're even competitors against each other, and so sometimes you get some asses changing data which or changing rules so to speak, which is supposed to update data at various different nodes, as as they all tell their neighbors. Hey we're now going to direct traffic in this way, we're now going to operate in this way, and it can lead to some really funky uh, odd changes that happen so uh, for example in 2008. Just to give you an example, because i think by example, this makes much more sense.

In 2008, a pakistani internet service provider tried to block users from visiting youtube, so what they did is they went through the border network, uh protocol and or border gateway protocol and said, hey nobody's allowed to go to youtube anymore through our nodes. Well, that information spread from the pakistani nodes to nodes really throughout the world and all of a sudden, nobody was able to access youtube for a period of time in 2008 uh, because this, this node change got advertised everywhere and it didn't just update in the pakistani Nodes it updated everywhere and they're. All like okay sounds good nobody's going to youtube kind of crazy. Now that was an accident most of the time.

These aren't actually hacks. These are just accidents like here's. Here's one, though, where you did have a hack in 2018. Amazon was attacked and hijackers created a bgp route.

So, like an update for those nodes, saying hey anytime, we get traffic for this. Certain thing redirect customers over here and uh. By doing so, these hackers were able to steal over a hundred thousand dollars of cryptocurrency by redirecting amazon traffic to themselves by hijacking these nodes. So uh now like what do you do in the future and are we still vulnerable for issues like this yeah? We are, and what can we do? Nobody knows in fact facebook still hasn't actually come out and given an official statement on this so right now this is still speculation and i'm doing my best to understand it as well.

So if you have a, if you have sort of a an additional commentary in terms of how i explain this, you can help educate the audience. A little more leave me a comment down below. I want to hear your perspective on this as well. This is my understanding of it, but there's been talk about updating the bgp system to make it more secure and more resilient to attacks.

However, remember that requires all of the automated systems to simultaneously update their behavior throughout the world and the 64 000 of them, at least so, unless we get everyone to agree to basically shut down the internet and turn it back on kind of like doing a hard Fork in cryptocurrency, we're, probably gon na, have to keep dealing with uh these bgp sort of problems, or even sometimes hacks or hijacks and uh yeah. It's gon na be something that yeah it will be, will make the internet very, very sensitive and we're definitely vulnerable to massive attacks and more outages like this in the future. Obviously - and hopefully we can prevent them but yeah. This gives you a little bit of insight into what the heck happened at facebook today and uh.

Can it happen again, heck yeah? Is it an easy fix? No, is it probably facebook's fault, it's probably somebody's fault. Somebody screwed something up with trying to update a single node which then broadcast to everyone regarding facebook. So it's probably somebody's fault, but the way the system is designed makes it very easy to take a fault kind of like a cancer cell and replicate it throughout the entire system very quickly. Anyway, if you found this helpful, consider, subscribing and folks see in the next one thanks, you.

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